Ciro Santilli
OurBigBook.comOf course, if academic journals require greater reproducibility for publication, then the cost per paper increases.
However, the total cost has to be smaller than the cost everyone who reads the paper spends to reproduce, no?
The truth is, part of the replication crisis is also due to research groups not wanting to share their precious secrets with others, so they can keep ahead of the publication curve, or maybe spin off a startup.
And when it comes to papers, things are even crazier: big companies manage to publish white papers in peer reviewed journals.
Ciro Santilli wants to help in this area with his videos of all key physics experiments project idea.
Cool initiative. Papers that do not share source code should be banned from peer reviewed academic journals.
It is understandable that you might not be able to reproduce a paper that does a natural science experiment, given that physics is brutal.
But for papers that have either source code or data sets, academic journals must require that those be made available, or refuse to publish.
Any document without such obvious reproducibility elements is a white paper, not a proper peer reviewed paper.
Big companies like Google are able to publish white papers as peer reviewed papers just due to their reputation, e.g. without giving any source code that is central for the article.
It is insane.
E.g.: AlphaGo is closed source but published as www.nature.com/articles/natnure16961 in 2016 on Nature.
Not the usual bullshit you were expecting from the philosophy of Science, right?
Some notable quoters:
- Jacques Monod has the exact quote as presented here: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22042272/, though presumably it was in French, TODO find the French version
- youtu.be/AYC5lE0b8os?t=41 A Computational Whole-Cell Model Predicts Genotype From Phenotype- Markus Covert by "Calit2ube" (2013), see also: Section "Whole cell simulation"
- the book Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) mentions a few incidents of this involving Feynman, see e.g. chapter "New Particles, New Language" where he and fellow theorist Hans Bethe immediately spot problems with experimentalists' data in suspicious results
The natural sciences are not just a tool to predict the future.
They are a reminder that the lives that we live daily are mere illusions, religious concepts such as Maya and Samsara come to mind.
We as individuals perceive nothing about the materials that we touch every day really work, nor more importantly how our brain and cell work.
Everything is magic out of our control.
The natural sciences allow us peek, with huge concentrated effort, into tiny little bits a little of those unknowns, and blow our minds as we notice that we don't know anything.
For all practical purposes in life, there is a huge macro micro gap. We are only able to directly perceive and influence the macro events. And through those we try to affect micro events. Because for good or bad, micro events reflect in the macro world.
It is as if we live in a different plane of existence above molecules, and below galaxies. The hierarchy of Figure "xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity" puts that nicely into perspective, shame it only starts at the economical level, not going up to astronomy.
The great beauty of science is that it allows us to puncture through some of the layers of reality, either up or down, away from our daily experience.
And the great beauty of artificial intelligence research is that it allows to peer deeper into exactly our layer of existence.
Every one or two weeks Ciro Santilli remembers that he and everything he touches are just a bunch of atoms, and that is an amazing feeling. This is Ciro's preferred source of Great doubt. Another concept that comes to mind is when you see it, you'll shit bricks.
Perhaps, the feeling of physics and the illusion of life reaches its peak in molecular biology.
Just look at your fucking hand right now.
Do you have any idea of each of the cells in it work? Isn't is at least 100 times more complex than the materials of the table you hand is currently resting on?
This is the non-science fiction version of the lotus-Eater Machine.
Alan Watts's "Philosopher" talk mentions related ideas:
The origin of a person who is defined as a philosopher, is one who finds that existence itself is exceedingly odd.
The toddler of a friend of Ciro Santilli's wife asked her mum:Our perception of the macroscopic world is so magic that children have to learn the difference between living and non-living things.
Why doesn't my tiger doll close its eyes when we sleep?
James Somers put it very well as well in his article I should have loved biology by James Somers, this quote was brought to Ciro's attention by Bert Hubert's website[ref].The same applies to other natural sciences.
I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names: the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle; mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA.In the textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment. Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was. I needed Lewis Thomas, who wrote in The Medusa and the Snail:For the real amazement, if you wish to be amazed, is this process. You start out as a single cell derived from the coupling of a sperm and an egg; this divides in two, then four, then eight, and so on, and at a certain stage there emerges a single cell which has as all its progeny the human brain. The mere existence of such a cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell.
Alan Watts' "Philosopher" talk (1973)
Source. Lecture given at UCLA on 1973-02-21. Some key quotes from the talk:The origin of a person who is defined as a philosopher, is one who finds that existence itself is exceedingly odd.
Nothing makes the fact that your life is an illusion clearer than animations of molecular biology processes. You just have no idea what is going on inside your own body right now!
And yet, we live, oblivious to all of it.
Amazing creators:
ATP synthase in action by HarvardX (2017)
Source. Electron transport chain by HarvardX (2017)
Source. This actually explains how mitochondrions use sugar derivatives and oxygen to transform ADP into ATP.The Inner Life of the Cell by XVIVO Scientific Animation (2011)
Source. Also created for BioVisions from Harvard University apparently like other amazing videos. It also has the best music.DNA animations by wehi.tv for Science-Art exhibition by WEHImovies (2018)
Source. Dengue virus Invades a Cell by XVIVO Scientific Animation (2008)
Source. Reupload by the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, which was reuploaded from www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/den08.sci.life.stru.dengue/dengue-virus-invades-a-cell/ which was reuploaded from wherever crazy place XVIVO put it.Drew Berry recommends having a look at clarafi.
Uses CC BY-SA, what a hero.
Goes along: if you could control your life multiple times to be perfect, you would eventually get tired of paradise, and you would go further and further into creating uncertain worlds with some suffering, until you would reach the current real world.
Very similar to The Matrix (1999) when Agent Smith talks about the failed Paradise Matrix shown at www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qs3GlNZMhY:
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your "perfect world". But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. So the perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.
Alan Watts' "The dream of life" talk
. Source. From episode "Mortynight Run"
Look at this. You beat cancer, and then you went back to work at the carpet store? Booooh.
Figure "xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity" must again be cited.
The opposite of from first principles.
Basically the opposite of reductionism.
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Ciro Santilli often wonders to himself, how much of the natural sciences can one learn in a lifetime? Certainly, a very strong basis, with concrete experimental and physics, chemistry and biology should be attainable to all? How much Ciro manages to learning and teach in those areas is a kind of success metric of Ciro's life.
- star.mit.edu/CellBio/index.html StarCellBio from MIT
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www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_H_TF5Kxks This Lab is RIDICULOUS (2021) gives an overview of their new laboratory, and hints of the types of projects they want to carry out.
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There is no clear distinction between "serious simulations" and "physics engines", it's just that "physics engine" have a "for video game" connotation.
And especially, in the context of gaming, it usually means "rigid body dynamics simulation" in particular.
We shouldn't have countries.
We should have one big global government, with one global language that everyone can speak, and slightly different local laws, so you can choose where to live based on the laws you approve of the most.
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Our definition: first generation to be born in country parent immigrated to.
We go forward by Owlturd
. Source. Being a first generation immigrant, this cartoon does make Ciro think about the future of his children.
Immigrating is incredibly time consuming and direclty limits what you can do in life later on. One can only hope that their children will take advantage of the new opportunities provided to them.
The author apparently self deleted his site at some point unfortnately: www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/7dyslp/apparently_shen_from_owlturd_is_going_on_hiatus/
While Ciro Santilli is a big fan of having "one global country" (and language), which is somewhat approximated by globalization, he has come to believe that there is one serious downside to globalization as it stands in 2020: it allows companies to pressure governments to reduce taxes, and thus reduces the power of government, which in turn increases social inequality. This idea is very well highlighted in Can't get you out of my head by Adam Curtis (2021).
The only solution seems to be for governments to get together, and make deals to have fair taxation across each other. Which might never happen.
The best way to learn about them as of 2020 is to Google into Know Your Meme.
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Best ones:
- Change in your couch
- Put ketchup on fries
Once upon a time in the 2010's, Ciro Santilli went to an artsy theatre venue in the suburbia of Paris, dragged by his wife then girlfriend of course.
In the venue, there was a politician, who was doing his best to show how much they supported the arts, and there were of course the artists, involved in the play.
The politician would see a political power score on top of every person's head, and would spend an amount of time talking to each person exactly proportional to that score. This meant basically one sentence to us. The words themselves didn't really matter of course, only the time spent, they just have to produce nice sounds.
One of the artists however, and he seemed quite important in the production, for some reason spent a huge amount of time speaking to us. The score the artist saw on our heads was of love, or how interested we were in the art.
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For similar reasons as Section "Regulate the fuck out of advertising".
Trump's election was an act of protest by the people, because they felt, and rightly so, that the promises by the democrats to decrease social inequality were just full of shit.
So instead, the old voice of nationalism spoke louder.
Ciro agrees with analysis of Can't get you out of my head by Adam Curtis (2021) that this is largely because government is losing all power to do anything meaningful. So the only thing left to do is to speak empty words to calm, or exacerbate, people's fears and hopes.
Ciro believes it is important not hate Trump and his believers, no matter how disgusting Trump might seem, a large part of which is likely theater. We have to try and understand them instead.
Trump's election shows clearly how the democrats let down the poor. This understanding is a good thing. It shows that we all have to make greater efforts to help the poor. Just voting for some random democrat candidate who doesn't really care every four years is not enough.
Another positive point of Trump's election is that it further highlighted the power of social media even further: it now feels more likely than ever before that anyone can run for office, since a president without any previous political office was elected (of course, being filthy reach helps a lot still, which is a problem). And this further highlights the need for regulate social media, to prevent events such as the deplatforming of Donald Trump
We should calmly analyze and understand how someone that tries their best to appear disgusting managed to win. Some interesting analyses of Trump's character:
- www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/the-mind-of-donald-trump/480771/ The Mind of Donald Trump by Dan P. McAdams (2016):and the author comments:It was as if the golden-haired guest sitting across the table were an actor playing a part on the London stage."It was Donald Trump playing Donald Trump," Griffin observed. There was something unreal about it.which is exactly the right way to approach things.
My aim is to develop a dispassionate and analytical perspective on Trump, drawing upon some of the most important ideas and research findings in psychological science today.
Falun Gong's support for Trump is described at: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/flg-trump at github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship.
Most damning moments:
- about women:
- en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donald_Trump_Access_Hollywood_tape&oldid=1001865204#Trump's_responses "Grab'em by the pussy" admissions, and later unadmissions
- www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/the-mind-of-donald-trump/480771/ quotes an interview by Mark Singer from 1990's:"O.K., I guess I'm asking, do you consider yourself ideal company?"You really want to know what I consider ideal company?," Trump replied. "A total piece of ass."
- corruption
- This was a beautiful comment, since it highlights not only that Trump is corrupt, but also that highlights that the others are corrupt, which is why the people elected him. TODO find video www.vox.com/2015/8/6/9114565/donald-trump-debate-money:
Q: You've also supported a host of other liberal policies, you've also donated to several Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton included, Nancy Pelosi. You explained away those donations saying you did that to get business related favors. And you said recently, quote, when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.
TRUMP: You better believe it... I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people. Before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me. And that's a broken system. - This was a beautiful comment, since it highlights not only that Trump is corrupt, but also that highlights that the others are corrupt, which is why the people elected him. TODO find video www.vox.com/2015/8/6/9114565/donald-trump-debate-money:
Fifth Republican Primary Debate - Main Stage - December 15 2015 on CNN
. Source. This perfectly summarizes the spectrum of republican politics. The only candidate who said anything decent were the two least popular ones, notably:- Rand Paul, saying that interventionism in the Middle East was a failure (Jeb notably still wants to repeat his brother's mistakes!), and supporting freedom of speech rather than censorship and violation of privacy
- Carly Fiorina, saying that the people must take the country back
SMALL LOAN OF A MILLION DOLLARS - Remix Compilation by TwinkieMan (2015)
Source. Nothing synthesizes is how bad the democrats have failed to help the poor. This is who got elected. Tagged
Ciro Santilli believes that the Donald Trump bans were extremely unfair, and highlight the need for government to ensure greater freedom of speech in social media, more information at: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/unjust-social-media-censorship-in-the-west, related: globalization reduces the power of governments.
The central theme of The Matrix (1999).
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Related:
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A few of the "I'd rather starve and do what I love than work some bullshit job people":
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD5hYCN-tmU&t Worldyman, German skater. Ciro Santilli said hi at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD5hYCN-tmU&lc=Ugz_QQOwrRG5Wjm52hp4AaABAg His reply suggests mental illness unfortunately:
Whenever I go viral, maybe in 5 years, maybe in 15, millions will arrive and cry their eyes out (i will be broken or dead). But it's alright, it's all here!
This section is about idealists who would rather starve doing what they love or believe in rather than do shitty jobs to survive. Artists for the most part you may call them.
The opposite of idealism.
Ciro Santilli believes it generally hurts more than it helps.
Especially when you can't even mention censored things to criticize them. You have to pretend they never existed. So people will forget about them, and do them again in the future.
And when companies do it just to look good, even though it has absolutely no real impact on the lives of those who are discriminated against.
- Stack Exchange's censorship of "I think Trump is disgusting as a person" from Ciro Santilli's profile: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/sstack-overflow-forbids-criticizing-the-character-of-genocidal-political-leaders-like-xi-jinping
The IETF was a notable one: www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/technology/racist-computer-engineering-terms-ietf.html
- developers.google.com/style/word-list (archive) Google's avoid word list is a masterclass in 2020's political correctness
By GitHub around Black Lives Matter, due to a possible ludicrous relationship with slavery of black people:
For the love of God, the word "master" is much more general than black slavery. If you are going to ban it, you might as well ban the word "evil".
Several software projects followed the purge from their codebases, maybe GitHub followed someone else's lead, it's hard to say.
The words "whitelist" and "blacklist" were also targeted.
Official announcement: magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/depictions-racism-magic-2020-06-10
List of cards with images: www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/06/wizards-bans-7-cards-that-depict-racism-including-invoke-prejudice/
- Invoke prejudice: depicts the Ku Klux Klan. Card's title clearly criticizes them "prejudice".
- Stone-Throwing Devils: not sure about this one: boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/54341/what-is-offensive-about-the-card-stone-throwing-devils
- Cleanse: it does not seem to have any reference to black people, image depicts fantastic animals. There are hundreds of cards that talk about black since it is one of the 5 colors of magic.
- Pradesh Gypsies: does not appear to suggest any bad things about gypsies, on the contrary
- Jihad: does not appear to suggest any bad things about Islam, on the contrary
- Imprison: depicts a black slave. Let's pretend it never happened.
- Crusade: pretend it never happened
By Wizards of the Coast, parent company of Magic: The Gathering.
Reddit discussion: www.reddit.com/r/mtgfinance/comments/h0kb84/depictions_of_racism_in_magic_aka_invoke/
This is notably what the United States emerged to be after World War II. But it was likely what Nazi Germany also was, and many other superpowers.
Ciro Santilli feels that much more relevant would be to also include academia as in "military-industrial-academic" complex, the Wikipedia page actually mentions precedents to this idea.
The addition of congress/politicians is also relevant.
But hey, the name wouldn't sound so slick with three parts.
It is basically in this context that American science and technology flourished after World War II, including notably the development of quantum electrodynamics, Richard Feynman being a prototypical example, having previously worked on the Manhattan Project.
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Fun fact: you can see they "No photography" signs on GCHQ's gates from Google Street View, but super low resolution, making them unreadable. They must have made a deal: Google gives its Street View data with uncensored plate numbers/faces, and GCGQ allows them to film in front of their building at low resolution! The sign actually shows up on their first Instagram post when they created one in 2018 www.gchq.gov.uk/news/gchq-joins-instagram | inews.co.uk/news/uk/gchq-instagram-puzzles-photography-hobbies-216444 Just passing in front of the damn place with Google Maps on must increase your "interest score"!
Edward Snowden in 2013
. Source. From the film Prism, during interview with reporter Glenn Greenwald.Edward Snowden original interview cut by The Guardian (2013)
Source. 
Aptitude test scene from the Snowden 2016 film
. Source. FISA Court Order The Guardian discussion scene from the Snowden 2016 film
. Source. How is this Possible? scene from the Snowden 2016 film
. Source. Fresh Brains for You scene from the Snowden 2016 film
. Source. On one hand, yes, we need knowledge at all levels, and it is fine to start top-to-bottom with an overview.
The problem is, however, that there is a huge knowledge gap between the one liner "this is the truth" and the much more important "this is how we know it, these are the experiments" as mentioned at how to teach and learn physics.
Therefore, if you have that extremely rare knowledge, you should be writing that in addition to the dumbed down version with an open knowledge license. It takes time, but that's what really changes the world.
Ciro Santilli has always felt that there is a huge gap between "the very basic" and "the very advanced", as mentioned at: Section "The missing link between basic and advanced", which existing scientific vulgarization is not doing enough to address. In a sense, filling out this "middle path" is the main goal of OurBigBook.com.
Ciro really enjoyed the description of the "Arindam Kumar Chatterjee" youTube channel:
Theoretical/mathematical physics at the graduate level and above. This is NOT a popular science channel. Here you find real theoretical physicists doing real theoretical physics. We think it is important for people to get a taste of the real deal, and for aspiring theoretical physicists to see what they are working towards, i.e., to provide the public with something beyond the ubiquitous Michio Kaku and Brian Cox.
One thing must be said however: there seems to be an actual bias against researchers tho try to create vulgarization material: How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University by Sean Carroll (2011), and that is terrible.
There is often more value in a tutorial by a beginner who is trying to fully learn and explain a subject, than by an expert who is trying to "dumb it down" too much.
Yet, all breakthroughs, comes from them, because the people who are crazy enough to believe they can change the world are the ones who actually do ;-)
How to deal articles:
- web.mst.edu/~lmhall/WhatToDoWhenTrisectorComes.pdf What To Do When The Trisector Comes by Underwood Dudley (1983)
- academia.stackexchange.com/questions/111413/what-is-the-best-way-to-deal-with-cranks/111414
- www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/beware-cranks
Basically the Royal Society's scientific vulgarization cousin.
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Maybe we need these people, maybe we do.
The problem as with many well known science communicators is that he falls too much on the basic side of the the missing link between basic and advanced.
Bill Nye isn't really a Scientist (& why that shouldn't matter) by BobbyBroccoli (2017)
Source. Bobby's personal overview of Bill's carrier.Mentinoned at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Baggott quoting popsciencebooks.blogspot.com/2012/09/jim-baggott-four-way-interview.html
Ciro Santilli and Jim would get along mighty well: there is value in tutorials written by beginners.
Ciro Santilli hates it when an expert does this!!!
If you estimate that the audience won't know the name of the concept, that's fine, do explain it as well.
But you must also give the name!!!
This also manifests itself when news outlets omit foreign names from healines, notably Chinese, but likely happens to all non-european languages too.
This is actually pretty good! Makes a small first step into The missing link between basic and advanced.
By the Simons Foundation.
Unfortunatly does not use a free license for content.
You can feel the marijuana flowing out of this one, it's just great.
Hosted by Bill Nye.
Physics topics:
- Galileo: objects of different masses fall at the same speed, hammer and feather experiment
- Newton: gravity, linking locally observed falls and the movement of celestial bodies
- TODO a few more
- superconductivity, talk only at Fermilab accelerator, no re-enactment even...
- quark, interview with Murray Gell-Mann, mentions it was "an off-beat field, one wasn't encouraged to work on that". High level blablabla obviously.
- fundamental interactions, notably weak interaction and strong interaction, interview with Michio Kaku. When asked "How do we know that the weak force is there?" the answer is: "We observe radioactive decay with a Geiger counter". Oh, come on!
biology topics:
- Leeuwenhoek microscope and the discovery of microorganisms, and how pond water is not dead, but teeming with life. No sample of course.
- 1831 Robert Brown cell nucleus in plants, and later Theodor Schwann in tadpoles. This prepared the path for the idea that "all cells come from other cells", and the there seemed to be an unifying theme to all life: the precursor to DNA discoveries. Re-enactment, yay.
- 1971 Carl Woese and the discovery of archaea
Genetics:
- Mendel. Reenactment.
- 1909 Thomas Hunt Morgan with Drosophila melanogaster. Reenactment. Genes are in Chromosomes. He observed that a trait was linked to sex, and it was already known that sex was related to chromosomes.
- 1935 George Beadle and the one gene one enzyme hypothesis by shooting X-rays at bread mold
- 1942 Barbara McClintock, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
- 1952 Hershey–Chase experiment. Determined that DNA is what transmits genetic information, not protein, by radioactive labelling both protein and DNA in two sets of bacteriophages. They observed that only the DNA radioactive material was passed forward.
- Crick Watson
- messenger RNA, no specific scientist, too many people worked on it, done partially with bacteriophage experiments
- 1968 Nirenberg genetic code
- 1972 Hamilton O. Smith and the discovery of restriction enzymes by observing that they were part of anti bacteriophage immune-system present in bacteria
- alternative splicing
- RNA interference
- Human Genome Project, interview with Craig Venter.
Medicine:
- blood circulation
- anesthesia
- X-ray
- germ theory of disease, with examples from Ignaz Semmelweis and Pasteur
- 1796 Edward Jenner discovery of vaccination by noticing that cowpox cowpox infected subjects were immune
- vitamin by observing scurvy and beriberi in sailors, confirmed by Frederick Gowland Hopkins on mice experiments
- Fleming, Florey and Chain and the discovery of penicillin
- Prontosil
- diabetes and insulin
If there is one thing that makes Ciro Santilli learn German, this is it (the Romance language are all the same, so reading them is basically covered for Ciro already).
From Scientific Autobiography by Max Planck translated by Frank Gaynor (1949):
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
How Math works by SMBC Comics
. Source. An amazing representation of Science makes progress funeral by funeral. Steps:- Step 1: Insight
- Step 2: Resistance
- Step 3: Debate
- Step 4: Additional decades of debate
- Step 5: Changing of the guard
- Step 6: Transmission to students
Full channel title: "Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People".
1-2 to hour long interviews, the number of Nobel Prize winners is off-the-charts. The videos have transcripts on the description!
TODO what is their affiliation/who is behind it? There is nothing on the website.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_Stories small wiki with almost no citations.
They suffer extremely from Section "To talk about something without giving the real name to not scare off the audience". But they also have merits.
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Good ones:
- Moving Still (1980); development of film technology
- Race for the Superconductor (1988): recounts the feeding frenzy for high-temperature superconductivity after the Swiss found a ceramic superconductor.
- The Proof (1997): Fermat's last theorem
- Absolute Zero: The Conquest of Cold (2008): cryogenics
Best one lists:
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Social science
words: 25k articles: 330